Electric vehicles, typified by electric cars, are equipped with rechargeable batteries, and with an electric vehicle the battery is charged at home, at one of the charging stations installed at various locations, or the like.
The battery deteriorates over repeating charging. Patent Literature 1 discloses a charging control device that performs charging by taking into account the deterioration of the battery. The charging control device described in Patent Literature 1 comprises a battery deterioration analyzer that selects the influence that the battery charging rate and the charge amount have on deterioration as a deterioration influence coefficient, and performs charging by setting the charging rate and the charge amount so as to minimize this deterioration influence coefficient. This suppresses deterioration of the battery due to charging.
Incidentally, recent years have seen the proposal of a battery exchange system (battery swap system) in which, when the battery in an electric car or other such electric vehicle goes dead, in order to reduce the waiting time for the user, the battery with a low charge installed in the electric vehicle is exchanged for a battery that has been previously charged, instead of charging the battery with the low charge while it is still installed in the electric vehicle (see Patent Literature 2, for example).